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Blogroll Me!
There are people on the net that have nothing better to do with their time
then be nasty to other people online. They post rude comments, spend hours
a day talking about sites they hate so much, that they well, spend hours a
day talking about them. (lame) They mock the owners and posters for their
opinions and their right to free speech. They expect everyone to fit into
their narrow-minded little world view or else they throw a temper tantrum.
To these people I say grow up.
Here's a bit of info people...the web is
a HUGE place. If you don't like what I say here, or who I am, or what I
do, or talk about, or what I look like, or the color of my hair, or
whatever asinine thing you dwell on, go somewhere else. It's
really, really easy. Honest. You just click the little "x" in
the corner of your browser and *poof* the offending, big, mean and nasty
site has disappeared.
I pay for this site. It's mine. That
means I can use it for whatever the hell I want to. Don't like it if I'm
bitching about something in my life? Oh fucking well. Go somewhere else.
Think I'm stupid for expressing my thoughts? Too fucking bad, don't read
them. Somewhere along the line, someone forgot this simple fact: Live
and let live Don't like me, cool, fine, whatever, I don't care.
This journal is NOT for you. It's for me. I'm not in it for popularity or
fame or anything stupid like that. I write it because I need to write and
express myself and get things out of my head sometimes. So read or don't,
it doesn't matter, but don't waste my time (or yours) bitching about it.
*gets off soapbox*
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wishlist and mailing address
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Santa Penguin Ornaments
Just wanted to show everyone what one of these cute little guys looks like on a tree.  They still stand just like their non-ornament cousins and when standing, you don't see the loop in their back. So they do double duty. But when you want, they also come ready for hanging with a lovely piece of ribbon. Get them on the Penguins! page here and simply put "ornament" in your order and I'll make sure you get one ready for hanging. I've just gotten orders for four more so now's the time to get your order in. I'll be making a few more batches and there's still time enough to receive them for Christmas. (If you want to be sure, let me know and I can get them to you Priority Mail.) Enjoy!
Friday, December 10, 2004
Must be Santa, Santa Claus!
Oh cool. I got my Secret Santa name today. So I'm already nosing through her blog and I see a note saying hi. Heh. Makes me smile and realize that someone will have gotten mine and will be nosing through my own blog for ideas and info. So a big hello to my Secret Santa! *waves* I've never done this before, so I'm very exicted. I did a secret santa exchange last year through a favorite mail site of mine, postcardx and that worked out nicely, so I have high hopes for this one. You can find 100 utterly random facts about me, prowl around my photography and even look at my creative outlets via my jewelry/horn/penguin site, PhoenixFire Designs. Anyway, I'm just giddy. I can't wait to find something really great for my person and I hope you have a fun time looking for something you think I'd like. Take care.
Hello, Hello? Are you out there...?
Spending the day over at my friend Rand's house. Doing laundry. Also brought my clay to work on making some more of my Penguins and Santa Penguins. The Santa Penguins are finally picking up and people are starting to order them. Which is good because they're damned cute and I think anyone would enjoy having one. I'm still working with making them be able to hang as an ornament though it's actually harder then it seems. My first attempt is certainly do-able, but the loop of clay I put on his back makes him lean forward when hung. (I bought some red ribbon to use for the hanging and it looks really nice.) I might try making a smaller poked hole through part of it instead, but I certainly don't want to make it too fragile of an area, nor crush the hat trying to get a hole through the back. The penguins don't stop on the front and the back of the Santa hat is just as nice as the front. I want to try to keep it that way. I'll upload a picture of what it looks like as an ornament later tonight or tomorrow. If you want to order one as an ornament, just order it from the Santa Penguins page like normal but put a note in the "other" field to make it an ornament. No extra charge. Oh, by the way, he'll still sit on his feet just like the other ones, or ornament ones just do double duty. *hums* I sat down to write an entry because I wanted to do something and felt like it, but now that I'm sitting here I find myself just staring at the screen and having no idea what to type. Hate that. *hums some more* We're supposed to go and look for a tree tonight. That'll be nice. I love putting up the tree. I love all my ornaments and I love sitting on the couch late at night and just watching the lights from the tree glint and glimmer. So pretty. Of course, we have the holy terror, Gracie, to deal with this year. She's so hyper and crazy (not to mention tiny) that I just know it's going to be a battle to keep her away from the tree. Oy. Well, I can't think of anything to talk about. All I can think about is things I need to do when I get home like email back people about various orders for jewelry and horns and let them know about availabilty and shipping. Two orders went out today, one more is ready as soon as I let her know they're ready and another is pending on the order being completed. But, there's plenty more and still time to get things made (even custom) and shipped before christmas. AND...bracelets are still on sale. Just saying. Lowest prices ever. Including the beautiful and popular Swarovski Crystal Bracelet. Mkay, I think I'll check on the towels in the dryer and work on my penguins. TTFN.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Dishwashers and Reporters - Oh My!
So the day started off early - 9am early - with a pounding on the door. Seems that finally our new dishwasher was coming. See, back when we moved in on Oct. 15th, we had the maintenence come out and look at the dishwasher because it was not only extremely noisey, but it vibrated the walls, floors and cabinents. The guy said we needed a new one and would put in the request. Almost two months went by where they key saying that "it was on order" and week after week they got annoyed with us for asking for a status update. Their thought was, "don't call us, we'll call you" which doesn't fly in my book - especially not for the amount of money we drop on this place each month. Finally, on Tuesday, the maintenence sup came to drain our hot water heater (because our hot water was coming out chunky; still is but oy, that's another entry) and I asked him about the status of the dishwasher. Turns out they hadn't ordered it, so he did. And, two days later, true to his word, it arrived. It still sounds more like a washing machine then a dishwasher but at least it's (a) new and (b) not vibrating through the floor. All this lead to me being up way earlier then I had planned for the morning. The reporter was set to come by at about 2pm this afternoon, so the plan was to get up 10:30am - 11:00am and that'd give me time to shower, put on make up and the whole bit. Plus just general time to veg which is a requirement. (I'm not one of those peopel who can wake up and be instantly up. You need to give me time to rejoin the realm of the awake. It's like warming up a car on a cold morning.) Anyway, the reporter and his cameraman came by pretty much on time. And we spent about an hour and a half working on different shots - him interviewing me, them filming me on the computer hooking up the iPod to the iTunes software, me working on my jewelry (he wanted a "hook" and though me listening to my music when I do my jewelry would work) yada yada yada.) Apparently, it's a Sweeps Week story though so I won't be seing it until February. He said he'll let me know. I had no idea it was going to be so far out into the future! He also bought one of my Santa Penguins after seeing them all lined up on my desk. Heh. Actually, he bought it on credit. He promised to send a check. I smiled and said he better since if he didn't, I'd let everyone online know it. Double Heh. ;) All in all it went fine. And he seemed so happy he ended up with me instead of someone who can't speak well in front of a camera. One thing I've never been is camera shy. ;) And speaking of penguins, I made a Santa Penguin last night with a loop on his back to accomedate a ribbon so he can be an ornament. I'm going to pick up some ribon tomorrow and offer the standard and ornament versions this weekend on the site. By the way, if you wanted to get in on the free iPod deal then please use this link so I can try to get my Love one too. He's totally envious that it worked and that I got the new toy and he didn't. *chuckles* And since I can't buy him one, I'm hoping we can earn him one through the site. I mean it worked for me - to the point of being on tv about it! - so it'll work for you. Sign up here and we both get the credit for it. Thanks. Well, I'm hungry, so it's off to make some food. I actually did something today (and something interesting to boot) so I've worked up an appitite. Chow...er, ciao!
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
This, That and the Other
It's been a boring week. I really haven't been doing much except sleeping. I've been sore and tired and just rundown this week. Me thinks it's hormonal. I really needed to get laundry done one of these days this week but I just haven't had the energy. Tomorrow the reporter is coming over to talk about my iPod I got from the freeipods.com site. So I'm trying to clean up a little. Don't want everyone seeing a messy apartment, you know? I've also been having a miserable nose problem this week. I'm just blowing my nose non stop and I don't know why. And it's all that gunky, thick nose blowing you get that makes you use more tissues then normal. The allergies forecast says everything's low to moderate so damned if I know what's making my nose be so runny. Of course the fact that it was 49F the other night at Disney and is now 82F outside probably isn't helping the old schnoz. Damned Florida weather doesn't know how to make up it's mind. Saturday's forecast for example is calling for a high of 65F. That's tonight's overnight low. *shakes head* Don't forget everyone that my Limited Edition Holiday 2004 Santa Penguins are still available and make a great gift. Handmade, handcrafted, each one is a little unique work of art.  Ho Ho Ho, won't you take me home? Also, all my bracelets are on sale over at PhoenixFire Designs. Any and all sales help me have a budget for christmas, so please consider getting a neat gift and helping me get gifts in return for my family. Alright, I should probably get back to the cleaning. I just wish I weren't so tired and lethargic. All I want to do is sleep. Out for now.
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Quick Question
My digital camera takes movies. It saves them in Quicktime (*.MOV) format. Problem is that it didn't come with the Pro version to edit the movies. Does anyone know of any freebie/shareware software to edit them? Simple stuff like resize and shorten? I have a few clips I took at Disney that I'd like to share but I worry about the size. Thanks.
Monday, December 06, 2004
Great Mail Day
Oh I love good mail days. They make me happy. Non-bill mail rules. In my mail was not only a holiday card from Dawna, but a key to open one of the package mailboxes. Inside were not one but TWO boxes!  Box Number One contained an amazingly lovely set of Sephora bath products from Dawna! It's all so lovely and so amazingly sweet of her!  The second was a box from amazon. Inside was the book Witch Crafting off of my wishlist from a brand new LJ friend, Gary. Wow! What a surprise! Thank you to both of you! What a happy day. I think a relaxing bath while reading some of my new book is definately in order! *big grin*
Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party - Recap
Ok, this is going to be a long one... So, as wel all know, the wonderfully sweet Cy got two tickets for my Love and I to attend the MVMCP on December 3rd. I've been looking forward to it for about a month and had planned everything so we could have as smooth and as easy a day and as much time at Disney as possible. Sadly, the best laid plans.... Friday. Noon. Love gets off work. (He took a half day.) I'm already up, getting ready and organizing what I need for the day. Two days before I had called Enterprise Rent-A-Car and put a reservation on a car for Friday afternoon pickup. (Our car is really on it's last legs and I didn't want to risk our only car breaking down AND missing the event.) The event starts officially at 7pm, but you can get into the park as early as 4pm, get a wristband and have two extra hours to roam around before the park closing at 6pm when they herd people with wristbands over into Tomorrowland. So we go to pick up the car just before 2pm, giving us two hours of trip time to get out there for 4pm arrival. Get there. Guy's a total fucking asshole. Gives us a hard time about everything. Then tells us there's a $200 credit card deposit for the rental car. I specifically asked two days prior exactly what I'd need for the reservation and rental. He only said the amount of the rental ($34.99). My credit card isn't a real credit card, it's a checkcard linked to my bank account. My bank account had only $100 in it because I didn't know I needed $200 for the hold. He won't do anything - not even hold $100 additional in cash or anything - except make us run to the bank. When we moved in October, we not only changed cities, but we're into another county now. Our bank only has branches in our old county. It's about a 20 minute drive away. So, it's already 2pm and now we have to drive to the bank, deposit $100 MORE dollars (our spending money which I saved up over the last month) and then drive back and get the rental. So we do. Drive all the way over there and all the way back. By this point, it's about 2:45pm. Not only are we losing time in Disney (it's between a 1 1/2 hour to 2 hour drive), but we're pushing into Friday afternoon commute traffic time, making the drive even longer. We get there, go through the paperwork again and he says the card came up declined. I have the receipt which says there's $215 available dollars in my account. He doesn't care, won't run it again, won't do anything and there's nothing he can or will do. Asshole!! So, now it's almost 3pm and we have no car. I break down crying. I don't have any reservation anywhere, don't know where else to rent one (because remember, we live in a wholly different area now), and don't think I can anyway since my check card didn't seem to want to authorize the $200 hold anyway! My friend Rand had off for the week. He builds up too much vacation time and every so often just takes time off so he doesn't lose it. He's working on stuff around his house. Having no idea what else to do we head to his place. It's just up the road from ours. Rand being the sweetheart that he is lets us borrow his Jeep. We leave him ours and our keys just in case and get out on the road. Everything's great for the first fifteen minutes until we hit I-275 through Tampa. It's all backed up. We inch our way through it to get to I-4. I-4 is the ONLY road to get to Orlando. That's it. So we finally get to it and for the first 25 miles, it's three lanes and the traffic breaks up and we get going. Things are looking good, finally. I'm still upset how late it is and how badly everything's been blundered so far but trying to get past it and look forward to just getting to Orlando. Two exits before the one for Disney, we come to a dead stop. For the next half hour, we crawl through this one area. When we get through it, there was no accident, no construction, nothing. Just massive, massive congestion. Oh and did I mention both of us had to pee like crazy and the drive was getting longer by the moment? Finally, we got to the WDW exit. Drive in, pay our $8 parking and head into the lot. Got parking really, really close up front for some reason (I guess people leaving emptied the spots and unlike normally, where they very strictly point you in one car after another into the spots, there was no one directing the cars so we just kept heading up front.) Got out, practically ran to the ticket center and hit the restroom. Ah...life is better. Next it's onto the ticket center to hit will-call for our tickets. Cy gave me a confirmation number and said they'd be waiting under my name. Get there, give the guy the number...and, you guessed it, not valid. The event by the way is sold out. So if they can't find the tickets, I can't get in even if I did want to buy a second pair. Looks up my name, looks up Cy's name, looks up Love's name - looks up varriations on all of our names. Nothing. He's clueless. Finally, after about 20 minutes the lady next to him says to let her try. About 30 seconds later, she's got it. The confirmation number had one too many digits in it and she just tinkered until she found it. I could have kissed her. Tickets in hand, we get on the monorail and get over to the Magic Kingdom. We get into the park a few minutes shy of 6pm. Think about that. We were planning on leaving at 2pm. Didn't borrow Rand's Jeep until after 3pm. Then spent not an hour and a half in drive time but over two and a half hours to get there, THEN 20 minutes to get the tickets. (All the time I was trying not to break down crying. It was like, what else can go wrong!) Finally though, we were there. We didn't get to go anywhere, we had to go right into Tomorrowland. The park was closing and they were keeping those of us coming in for the event over there only. So we rode Carousel of Progress. (Which was good because after the party started, it closed.) Then we went and rode Buzz Lightyear. Always fun. After that, we hit the new Stitch ride. "New" is pushing it. It was exactly the same story and effects of Alien Encounter - just watered down and with a Stitch overlay. I was really disappointed. Why it took a year to do that I'll never understand. And all the people coming off were really disappointed too. Not one person had a nice thing to say about it. Sheesh, I was really embarrased for WDW. I'd never heard such universally negative comments coming off a ride before. Ever. It was about seven by then so we had free roam of the park. We went up to Main Street to see the snow. It was really neat how they did it. In the air, it really looked like snow flurries. Really light and airy. (If you want to know how they did it, ask and I'll let you know. Don't want to spoil it for anyone if they didn't want to know.) It was all so pretty though. All the christmas lights strung up, the massive tree, the snow - it was so beautiful and magical. Over the course of the night, we rode Pirates of the Caribbean, Philharmagic, Haunted Mansion (and met a really nice lady from one of the Disney communities I belong to and even brought her some cookies - Hi Vanessa!), Buzz, Carousel of Progress, Big Thundar Mountain (twice), PeopleMover (TTA) (twice), Stitch, saw the Parade, watched a special, enchanced version of Wishes (the fireworks show), got super, super yummy free hot cocoa and cookies, got our photo taken with Donald, got our MVMCP photo taken for free (they send you a print), and just generally enjoyed ourselves. It was a really, really great night. I didn't want to leave. There was so much to do and so many special shows and events going on that I'd love to go back again to see more of it. And despite the event being sold out, I didn't feel it was overly crowded at all. They limit the number of tickets and I think it's a good number. I've been to the park many, many times on "normal" days when it was way busier then that. We didn't wait more then five to ten minutes for anything and even the most crowded times - around the Castle hub for Wishes and the Parade - weren't jammed packed. Most normal nights you can't even squeeze through, but there was plenty of room to move and we were right up front for the Parade coming there a few minutes before it was scheduled to start. Normally, you'd need to line up a half an hour to an hour in advance. Wishes was fantastic too. Already an AMAZING display, the finale was shot off literally all 360 degrees around you. So you didn't just have them going off next to the Castle, but all around you and circling the entire park. It was amazing. Needless to say I didn't want to leave. At all. I just kept looking around and wanting to hold on to all of it for just a little bit longer. It was so pretty. And by the time we were getting ready to leave (after looking through the stores for awhile), almost empty. So it was really peaceful. We headed out about 1:20am (the event ended at midnight but they always have the shops open after for awhile). By then, it was starting to get a real bite to the air. The gauge on Rand's Jeep said it was about 49F at that point. Feels-like might have been a few degrees lower because there was a bite to the wind. Tired and worn out, we headed home. And ran smack dab into a four-mile back up road stop for construction on I-4. Ugh. I hate that road. Put it this way, I've lived in Florida for almost twenty years now. The road has been under construction without break for literally as long as I've been here. They're trying to expand it to three lanes the whole length, but so far, only the first 25 miles out of Tampa are three lanes. The rest is disaster. It was about 3am by the time we pulled into Rand's garage. We needed our car and our apartment keys which we left with him with our car keys. Poor Rand had clearly fallen asleep, but was sorta up when we came in. We had hoped to not wake him and just make the swap and head home but, not so much. We picked up a Donald ornament for him - his favorite character and something he asked us to keep an eye out for - and headed home ourselves. We got a set of Mickey ear ornaments for our tree and I got the pin for the night's event. I also got a Santa hat that had Mickey ears on it that I wore around all night. It's really cute and it kept my head warm. Hee hee. What was really great about the event was that since it's a seperate ticket - even if you're a passholder you have to buy a ticket for it - it's really only people who want to be there. No angsty teens or anything. So most people were wearing santa hats, christmas tree hats and one group was even dressed up live elves complete with ears and batery-operated christmas lights strung on them! It was a hoot. Everyone was a Disney and a holiday fan and so it was all the more fun for it. Huge thanks again to Cy. Seriously. It was such a great gift. If you haven't already, go check out the photos from the night. Sadly, most of them didn't come out (either too dark because my flash's range is apparently non-existant) or blurry (because I forgot to bring my mini tripod) but they're decent enough for a web gallery. I just won't be able to really print any out. :( They're still fun though and show off some of the neat detail of the event as well as much of the parade. I also have a few small quicktime movies that I'm going to look into uploading since they look nicer then many of the photos. All-in-all, we had a wonderful time. Once we got there. It was just the getting there and getting in part that was the problem! But, disaster after disaster avoided and we made it through all the hurdles and still had a great time. I highly recommend if you ever get a chance to go, to do so, because it's really a wonderful event.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
MVMCP Photos!
To tide you over. I still need to write the recap, but it's HUGE so I'll work on it. In the meantime...here's my photo galleries for the Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party for your enjoyment. The parade as well as general decoration and park shots. MVMCP - December 3, 2004 at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World.
Jolly Roger
M's Jolly Roger Pumpkin The site where I got the pattern from puts up a gallery of the pumpkins. Mine's in the gallery and I just got the email so I thought I'd show it off. (and yes, I have disney update and photos to show, but I'm still working on that. wanted to show this before I forgot.)
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